This blog started out to be about a post BarbaraNeely wrote for the AARP at 70 about becoming 65.

It really impressed me the first time I read it, but when I read it again before writing this, I realized that while it was a good post, it caught me because of who had written it, and what I knew was behind it.

BarbaraNeely is a life long activist who is the author of the Blanche White mysteries. I’ve recently reread them and was once again impressed with her writing and her politics. These are very good books. I was looking on the web hoping that she had written a 5th Blanche White mystery (unfortunately not) when I found the AARP post.

Says Neely, “I wanted to provide a perspective rarely seen in fiction, that of a poor, black domestic woman.” This she has done to the delight of mystery readers hungry for a hero of substance. Neely’s eye for the literary detail that reveals as much about the human condition as it does about murder has led some to compare Blanche to no less than Langston Hughes’s classic character, Jesse B. Semple, from his Simple stories. As writer Ntzoke Shange has been quoted as saying, “[Blanche] rivals Simple in her insight, political savvy, and humor on the ways of white folk.”

…”I see Blanche both as an everyday black woman and as an agent for change,” Neely continues. “She’s a behavioral feminist!” But, when asked if she feels women are such avid readers of mysteries because the genre offers them the “dream of justice,” Neely snaps, “Anyone looking for justice in a book needs to sign up with an organization and make it happen in the world! There’s very little justice in the Blanche books; they’re reality based.

My stuff is always about what’s going on in the black community, because that’s who Blanche is. It’s interesting to me that academic papers have been written on Blanche. But I’d like to hope, too, that women who have domestic help will, after reading a Blanche book, look at the woman vacuuming the floor and see her as a person, rather than as a function, and act accordingly.”

I’ve also been thinking about the movie The Help. It’s about a black women and the white families they work for. It is set in the 60s. Here is a piece of the review by Amy Biancolli that I read in the SF Chronicle.

Good story, great characters, a setting plucked from history – and a multiracial, multigenerational ensemble cast stacked with fabulous actresses. But the thing that makes “The Help” such a rousing crowd-pleaser is its generous helping of baked goods.

“The Help” is loaded with spirited character turns, the best of them Spencer’s: that comic glare of hers is looking major stardom in the face. Other standouts include Leslie Jordan as a nutty little editor; Sissy Spacek as Hilly’s loopy, laughing mother; Jessica Chastain as a joyously low-rent ditz with a painful secret; and Cicely Tyson, appearing in flashback, as the beloved maid who raised Skeeter. Now 79, Tyson is the film’s quavering moral center, the one who doles out life lessons and – for anyone who remembers her in “Roots” and “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” – connects “The Help” with those germinal African American historical sagas of the 1970s.

I grew up about the time the time The Help is set in. When 90 % of the black women in the south worked as maids and many many of them in the North. When black maids were exploited, paid little, trapped by lack of opportunity, and every middle class white family could afford “help”. I don’t usually write about movies I don’t see, but in this case it would make me too angry so I’m making an exception.

Here’s what BarbaraNeely said about movie offers for the Blanche White books:

Neely’s had a number of movie offers, but fearing her beloved character will be turned into “an Aunt Jemima, or someone lighter, younger, and cuter,” she has turned them all down.

On behalf of the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), this statement provides historical context to address widespread stereotyping presented in both the film and novel version of The Help. The book has sold over three million copies, and heavy promotion of the movie will ensure its success at the box office. Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers. We are specifically concerned about the representations of black life and the lack of attention given to sexual harassment and civil rights activism.

…Furthermore, African American domestic workers often suffered sexual harassment as well as physical and verbal abuse in the homes of white employers. For example, a recently discovered letter written by Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks indicates that she, like many black domestic workers, lived under the threat and sometimes reality of sexual assault. The film, on the other hand, makes light of black women’s fears and vulnerabilities turning them into moments of comic relief.